by Clive James
One of the first things I noted was that although there were hundreds and even thousands of pornographic movies they all had the same few half-witted story structures and almost without exception they were manufactured in Los Angeles, with a cast of characters that soon became recognizable no matter where in the world you were watching. Indeed that was the chief comfort they offered. If you were lonely in a hotel room in Sydney or Amsterdam, there on the screen were the same old familiar few faces from the San Fernando Valley, the men with their improbably low foreheads and permanently puzzled expressions, the women with their enhanced lips and strangely rigid chests, as if wearing a tungsten basque internally.
For a student of bad acting, there could be no richer field. It’s not as if the porno stars merely lack dramatic talent. They have the opposite of dramatic talent. Yet touchingly they are more interested in the challenges offered by the roles they play than in the sex part. The man pretending to be the scientist whose job is to check the sexual sensitivity of the female astronaut just back from space keeps adjusting the collar of the white coat which proves that he is a scientist. He holds his clipboard in a scientific manner. Meanwhile the woman playing the astronaut delivers her line of dialogue. ‘I don’t know, Doctor. I guess something happened to me out there.’
None of them can act because none of them really has a personality: a fact which is only further emphasized when they attempt to effervesce. As a result, they are no more erotic when they disrobe than plaster casts of roughly the same size and weight. I hasten to add that not all of the women are low rent in their physical attributes. All the men look stupid beyond belief, but some of the women would be almost personable in the right light, which this definitely isn’t. The lighting is harsh for the same reason that there is so little pubic hair in evidence. The aim is to make the whole thing look clinical.
From the erotic angle, adult entertainment movies are made for men whose idea of the adult barely gets beyond the babyish. For anyone with a brain, there is not only no question of being aroused, there is a detectable shrivelling effect on the libido. In time, a connoisseur of the form learns to trust it as a sure-fire means of getting the mind off sex.
Is your partner away in Brussels making a speech? Get your mind off sex by watching a porn video. Just don’t watch too many of them, or you might burn out your circuits permanently. Plenty of men have done this. They watched Barely Legal Teenage Terminators once too often, and now nothing stirs even when they eat blue pills like peanuts.
Yes, men, you can watch the stuff in perfect safety any time you want to quell that urge. But it might, on the whole, be safer not to expect the public to nod with understanding if you charge the expense to them. I’m quite confident that Jacqui Smith’s husband was doing her a service, as it were, when he switched on the purportedly hot movies. He was doing it to cool himself down while he counted the hours until her return. But then he made the mistake of claiming the cost as a legitimate expense. You could say that it was, in a way. If his job of running her office is legitimate, then keeping himself sane in the absence of his partner is plainly part of his duty, and the attendant costs shouldn’t have to come out of his pocket, especially in view of the fact that her position as Home Secretary must infinitely multiply her effect as an object of desire. I can remember very well when I felt that way about Sir Geoffrey Howe.
But Richard Timney should have realized that the mass of the British public is still convinced that there is such a thing as sauciness. They are not yet living in the modern age. They are still living in a Carry On movie. Only a comparatively small proportion of the public have as many channels as Mr Timney had in his home entertainment centre and have seen what a cable channel programme like Sexcetera is actually like. The presenters of Sexcetera, when they aren’t hearty young American females with breasts bigger than their behinds, are hearty young American males with grins bigger than their heads, screaming in a stage whisper about the secrets behind the silver-studded black-leather-quilted door. There are never any secrets worth bothering about behind the silver-studded black-leather-quilted door. There are people of repellent aspect doing ridiculous things to each other with clinical-looking equipment, but there are never any secrets.
Because there is only one secret about sex, and that is that it’s a feeling, and you can’t see feeling. Some of the greatest artists who ever lived did their best to register the look on a woman’s face when she is in ecstasy. Bernini almost did it, Gustav Klimt almost did it, and if you’re a man dying for lack of love you could start with them. But looking at porno movies will get you so far in the opposite direction that you might as well watch a programme about stock-car racing.
The real story in this matter, however, isn’t about a man watching images. It’s about a man leaving a paper trail. In that respect, it was he who hadn’t caught up with the modern age. In a hotel, they promise you that the name of the porno movie you watched won’t show up on your bill. But if somebody else is paying your bill, they can easily figure out that you watched it. If you had resigned yourself at the time to paying for those two stupid movies with your own money, Richard, Jacqui wouldn’t be paying now.
Postscript
I was only just exaggerating about the tedium of pornographic videos. If the weeping pink caverns and the torrential money shots are what you’re after, you (I take it that ‘you’ are a bloke) doubtless already know that the Web is the place to cruise. On the Web, just checking out the free samples and without handing over a single credit-card detail, you can click from one mind-rotting spectacle to another until one day you wake up and realize you have turned into a puddle of grease. Off the Web, in the videos available for rent or purchase, what you mainly get is the acting in between the bits you’re after, and the acting is invariably in full keeping with the intelligence and talents of the participants. The porn videos attract much solemn sociological comment but none of it should be trusted, because the subject is too funny for anyone except the occasional gifted writer like Martin Amis to do it justice. The discrepancy between intention and effect, between self-importance and actual importance, is so great that only a comic imagination can see the tragedy.
Any writer planning a novel about porn who does research on the Web had better have plans prepared for getting his hard-drive crushed at a moment’s notice, in case the police break in. On the prevailing scale of public condemnation, ‘research’ into adult porn rates comfortably lower than ‘research’ into paedophilia, but it would still make a good story in the press. For now at least: I suppose the day will come when there will be a market even among six-year-olds for pictures of five-year-olds being violated. In no other area of everyday life do the Latin tags tempus fugit and o tempora, o mores apply with quite such force. For those of us who once thought that Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones were hot stuff, the computer now on our desk might as well be a window on the underworld. Don’t even think of poking your finger in there.
On the subject of time passing, I should note that Jacqui Smith lost her seat at the next election and duly took the path to oblivion, which can happen to famous politicians as it happens to their ideas. My gag about New Labour being tough on pole-dancing depended upon the slogan ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, a catch-phrase now forgotten like most of Tony Blair’s other promises. Generally one likes to future-proof one’s prose but not at the cost of leaving out the commonly quoted current verbal trivia. And anyway, some of it stays current: o tempora, o mores, for example. Nice one, Cicero. One in the eye for Catiline.
BRIGHT SIDE OF THE CANE TOAD
Dates of show: 10 and 12 April 2009
People who despair for the future of life on earth should take heart from the capacity of living creatures to adapt when threatened. In the last few days there has been news about an inspiring instance of this capacity. Once again the focus of international media interest is on my homeland, Australia. I speak of the cane toad. The size of a cheap handbag and covered in warts, the ca
ne toad can be found in many parts of Australia. Indeed the cane toad can be found in so many parts of Australia that experts predict there will be soon no part of Australia in which at least one cane toad, or more likely several thousand cane toads, cannot be found.
No matter what the degree of force and ingenuity employed, there has so far been no getting rid of the cane toad. We are invited to worry about this, but I prefer to be encouraged, and to worry just that little bit less about Iranian atomic bombs, North Korean multistage rockets, and the imminent immersion of the inhabited world under a rising ocean dotted with the charred corpses of polar bears. Earthly life-forms are tough, and the career of the cane toad shows just how tough they can be.
You probably know most of the cane-toad story already because my country of origin, in order to ensure that its high standard of living should not be threatened by a population of excessive size, has a kind of anti-tourist board dedicated to making Australia look less attractive than it might be in the eyes of the world. After World War II, the anti-tourist board spread stories through overseas outlets about Australia’s teeming range of poisonous spiders and snakes. There were stories of the red-back spider that hides under the toilet seat to avoid publicity, and the taipan snake that was so poisonous it could kill a man on a horse after killing the horse, and would do both these things unprovoked, because it liked publicity. The anti-tourist board was scarcely obliged to exaggerate. Australian spiders and snakes are really like that. So you’re a prospective migrant and you’re afraid of getting bitten a little bit? What are you, a man or a mouse? If you’re a mouse, you’ve got no business going near a taipan anyway.
More recently, the anti-tourist board positioned its enormous influence behind a film called Australia, which was plainly designed to put immigrants off going to Australia by presenting, at enormous length, a prospect of a country where nothing happened except a hundred and fifty thousand cattle moving slowly across the parched landscape, each beast pausing for an individual close-up at any moment when the director thought the pace was too hectic. But the most reliable weapon in the armoury of the Australian anti-tourist board has always been the story of the cane toad.
Scarcely believable on the face of it – and the face of it is the face of the cane toad, which is scarcely believable in itself – the story is true in every respect. The first few of the unprepossessing creatures were imported into Queensland in 1935 because it was thought that they would help protect the sugar-cane crop by eating the grey-back cane beetle, a pest. So the cane toads were doing pest control. The thought that the creature imported to do pest control might itself become a pest had not yet occurred to anybody.
1935 was a big year for Australia because Mutiny on the Bounty, with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, was the top box-office movie in the world and therefore the attention of the entire planet was on the South Pacific, a circumstance which always tends to turn the collective head of the Australian media. In such a climate of glory, even a cane toad looked good. Not as good as Clark Gable, perhaps, but at least as good as Charles Laughton.
Alas, it soon became apparent that the cane toad was less interested in eating the grey-back cane beetle than in eating everything else whether living or dead and, most disastrously, in being eaten itself, with stunning results for whatever ate it, because the cane toad was poisonous. Its body is composed largely of poison glands which produce a narcotic that is currently classified officially in Australia as a Class One drug along with heroin and marijuana. Toad licking, we are told, can result in death.
Lucky I was told that soon enough, or I might have tried it as the next step up from the hash cookie. But inevitably, this classification as a drug in Class One induces some people to try it out. The results of ingesting the toxin, however, are seldom good for humans and they can be lethal for almost any other creature, up to and including crocodiles. These facts were found out quite soon after the cane toad was introduced. These facts were found out by the same experts who had thought that the cane toad would be good for pest control. But by the time it was discovered that the cane toad was a lot better at being a pest itself, the cane toad had revealed its other characteristic, a fantastic ability to increase in numbers.
By now, as I speak, there are more than three hundred million of them and their number has increased significantly since the start of this sentence. And as their numbers increase, they travel, because there simply wouldn’t be room for all the cane toads if they stayed in one place. They didn’t even stay in Queensland for long, and by now they have moved a long way west. You have only to see a close-up of even one of these creatures to know what it would mean for vast tracts of the country to be covered with them even if they were harmless and tasted like hamburger.
A creature with few successful predators ranged against it – and most creatures who want to eat the cane toad die on the spot a few minutes after they try to – usually won’t be kept down just because human beings like the taste of it. The first big pest problem introduced into Australia was the rabbit, which, back in the nineteenth century, was brought in to provide country gentlemen with good hunting. In short order there were untold millions of them. Rabbits made good eating but they were eaten only by the poor. When we ate rabbit in our house while I was growing up I was encouraged not to mention it in case we were looked down on. But even if everybody in the country had eaten rabbit three times a day it wouldn’t have made a dent in the rabbit population, which went on increasing until a specifically anti-rabbit disease called myxomatosis was let loose.
After an initial reduction in the rabbit population, the long-term effect was the emergence of a super rabbit. Those of us who remember that will be suspicious of plans to introduce a genetic switch in the cane toad that will turn them all into males and therefore extinguish the cane-toad population. The performance of the cane toad so far suggests that even if they all turn into gay males and start collecting Judy Garland records they will go on taking territory at the rate of fifteen miles a year, which more or less means that there will soon be enough of them in Canberra to demand voting rights.
The news last week was that there are new plans to unleash a predator against them, the meat ant. Confidence in the meat ant is high. Whereas frogs and other kinds of toad will flee at the mere sight of a meat ant, we are told, the cane toad will just sit there cooperatively waiting to be attacked and killed. But there are two things wrong with that story. One thing wrong is that that’s exactly what the grey-back cane beetle was supposed to do when the cane toad showed up, and the other is, what if it works and the meat ant becomes the new unstoppable success? Much wiser to concentrate on those voting rights.
If the cane toad can survive so much, then it can evolve, and the signs are that it’s already doing so. The evidence was buried in last week’s report, but I underlined it and I’ve got it here in front of me. This is the bit you probably haven’t heard yet, but I think it might be crucial. As the advance guard of the cane toad mass moves west, its leading members are developing longer and stronger legs. Have you got that? The cane toads are getting bigger and smarter. Soon they’ll be learning to drive. There is a school of thought, not necessarily paranoid, which holds the opinion that cane toads with human skills have already penetrated the Australian media and are even appearing as presenters of reality television shows. That might be a fear too far, but surely it makes sense to start thinking of how the cane toads can be dealt with in another way than warfare.
It’s time to negotiate. We need to find out what their demands are. What do they want? One thing they might want is aid. You have to believe me when I say that the same scientists who have measured the longer and stronger legs of the vanguard toads have also diagnosed arthritis. Limping toads, wincing with pain as they advance. Common humanity demands that we should make an antidote available. I say it’s time to sit down with their leaders and discuss matters of mutual benefit. If they can evolve that fast, maybe they’ll turn into a better version of us. Maybe they already ha
ve. Maybe some of them have got on planes to spread the cane-toad message to the world. But no, take it easy. I’m just croaking. I mean I’m just joking. Croak, croak.
Postscript
During this period, in the press, mankind, because of its irresponsible abundance of emissions, was routinely held responsible for threatening the death of ten different species every day, or a hundred a week, or ten thousand a year, or whatever figure sounded impressive after the previous figure had begun to sound unimpressive. It was seldom mentioned that in the natural world most species are threatened continually by several other species: that rendering each other extinct is what species are trying to do all the time. The plundering baleen whale is not telling itself that with its next mouthful it will take just enough krill to ensure the continuance of the species. It just goes whumpf.
Somewhere about this time, the bandicoot was revealed to have become lethal on a scale hitherto unprecedented, but no doubt this was due to Climate Change, because finally mankind had to be the culprit. Nevertheless some species theoretically on the road to extinction were getting there by a circuitous route, especially the polar bears, which continued to increase in numbers. Unfortunately for chiliasts at the IPCC and in the mainstream media, there are responsible government officials paid to count polar bears. The more the polar bears were pronounced doomed, the more polar bears there turned out to be, despite regular appearances in all media of the lone bear standing on the tiny ice floe. The tiny ice floe proved to have been Photoshopped but nothing could threaten the existence of the idea of polar bears running out of ice. The idea went on turning up even in BBC climate-change surveys of supposedly impeccable prestige. Mankind, it was agreed, threatened the lives of all creatures except one. Mankind’s bad environmental behaviour could do nothing about the cane toad. Mankind could sit in its Range Rover with the engine running all night and not a single cane toad would even cough. Speaking of which, you will notice that this script ends with a sound effect, in which I imitate a cane toad. In performance, I managed it, but only because I kept it short. The non-comic broadcaster who wishes to be entertaining can’t be counselled too strongly against vaudeville.
